


by 

3.0SE WHITE VERNON 




Class JB.5lili 

Book S/A- 

Copyright N° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF 
THE OLD TESTAMENT 



The 
RELIGIOUS VALUE of 
the OLD TESTAMENT 

in the Light of 
Modern Scholarship 



BY 



AMBROSE WHITE VERNON 

H 

Professor of Biblical Literature in 
Dartmouth College 



* 



New York 
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO, 

Publishers 

LA_tq 



y(Ar 



UBBARYofCONfiRESS 
Two Copies Received 

MM 8 190/ 

CLASS £ XXc„Nb. 
/ «OPY B. W 



Copyright, 1907, 
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

Published, March, 1907. 



FRANCIS BROWN 
STEADIER AND ENLARGER OF HUMAN LIVES 



For rigorous teachers seized my youth, 
And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire, 

Showed me the high, white star of Truth, 
There bade me gaze, and there aspire. 

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The Change of Attitude to the Old Testa- 
ment i 

II. The Older View of the Religious Value of 

the Old Testament .... 7 

A. It establishes the existence of God and 

the divinity of Christ 

B. It gives infallible direction to the 

believer 

III. Defects of this Older View . . . 15 

A, In failing to apprehend Old Testament 

religion 

B. In externalizing religion 

C In begetting a trivial conception of God 

IV. The Untenability of the Older View . . 23 

V. A Modern View of the Religious Value of 

the Old Testament .... 29 

A. It presents characters supremely worthy 

of reverence 

B. It records the discovery of our funda- 

mental religious truths 

C. It is essential to a correct apprehension 

of Jesus Christ 

VI. Conclusion 79 

vii 



- . 



THE RELIGIOUS VALUE OF 
THE OLD TESTAMENT 



THE CHANGE OF ATTITUDE TO THE OLD 
TESTAMENT 

It is obvious that the attitude of the educated 
man to the Bible has undergone nothing less 
than a revolution. Instead of the authori- 
tative pronouncement of Deity through arbi- 
trarily chosen instruments, the Bible is now 
regarded as a great body of literature, one part 
differing from another part in glory. And the 
parts have been seen to be of far greater value 
than the whole. As the Bible lies before us, 
it is a misleading book. Both in the Old and 
in the New Testaments, the historical frame- 
work is untrustworthy. The ecclesiastical 



2 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

writers of the Bible are no better historians 
and no more free from prejudice — to use 
no stronger word — than ecclesiastical writers 
generally. It is now clearly understood that 
the priestly authors and editors who are re- 
sponsible for the final form of the Old Testa- 
ment history, from Genesis to Chronicles and 
Ezra, thoroughly misconceived its movement 
and its meaning. And I think it is gradually 
being felt, though not so universally insisted 
upon, that the author of the Acts of the Apostles 
has reproduced in somewhat less flagrant man- 
ner the error of the Old Testament ecclesiastics. 
The ecclesiastical writers of the Old Testa- 
ment wrote history from the view-point of the 
temple ritual and priesthood, and the author 
of the Acts was unduly influenced in his choice 
of material by the theories of the origin and 
unity of the Christian Church, which were 
current in his time. The result is unfortu- 
nate in two respects. In the first place, the 
really vital forces in the history of the Jews 
and the great conflicts in the history of the 
Apostolic Age are almost totally ignored. Had 



THE CHANGE OF ATTITUDE 3 

it not been for the preservation of the writings 
of the prophets and of the letters of Paul, we 
should have been utterly unable to understand 
the actual historical development of the re- 
ligion of Israel and of Christianity. In the sec- 
ond place, the writers push much too far back 
the establishment of the temple priesthood in 
the one case, and of churchly authority in the 
other. In the Old Testament this error of 
the priestly writers is so marked that even 
were there no similar tendencies among the 
prophetic school of historians, Wellhausen 
would be fairly justified in declaring that here 
"we have a religious history that shuts history 
out." 

It is not too much to say that the theory of 
the Chronicler of the Old Testament and of 
the historian of the New Testament, so far 
from being an accurate guidepost to the his- 
torical student, is rather a protecting shell 
which has to be broken through to find the 
meat. It is just the material which had least 
value to these historians and which was pre- 
served only through a reverence for the past — 



4 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

such as the ancient stories of David, tucked in 
at the end of Samuel, the strong ringing strophes 
of the minor prophets, and the parables of 
Jesus, preserved in Mark as examples of spir- 
itual mysteries (!) — which constitute for us 
the most precious treasures of the Bible. And 
so it has come to pass that the attention of men 
is being diverted from the Bible as a whole, 
that is to say from the Bible as an oracle, to 
the separate writings of which it is made up. 

But it is plain that the great literary power 
of the Bible will be lost to us, unless its religious 
power may somehow be retained. The books 
of the Bible which make the strongest literary 
appeal are precisely those which are epoch- 
making in religion. The permanence of their 
literary influence must in the last analysis de- 
pend upon the value of their religion. We 
may keep the Bible on a remote shelf of our 
libraries in any case; its historical interest 
and significance assures that; but if we are 
to keep it on our study tables, we must believe 
in and live upon its religion. Now the por- 
tion of our Bible that has seemed to be in the 



THE CHANGE OF ATTITUDE 5 

greatest danger of being put upon the shelf 
through the influence of the keen criticism 
of recent years is the Old Testament. Not- 
withstanding far-reaching discoveries in the 
field of New Testament criticism, the supreme 
character of Jesus has been more and more 
clearly recognized as the great inspiration of 
mankind, and the first three gospels as the most 
immortal of books. We are dealing, then, with 
what in one aspect is the most critical question 
in regard to the future of the Bible, if we ask 
ourselves if modern research and scholarship 
have destroyed or enhanced the religious value 
of the Old Testament. 

For whether for good or ill, it seems indis- 
putable that the large results of modern scholar- 
ship have become thoroughly established. In 
the more important matters a striking agree- 
ment has been reached by the leading biblical 
scholars of Germany, England, and America. 
It would expand this essay into too large a book 
to marshal the proof of even the main con- 
tentions, of scholars like Wellhausen and Duhm 
in Germany, Robertson Smith and Driver in 



6 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

England, George Moore and Henry Preserved 
Smith in our own country. Suffice it to say 
that the standpoint of this essay is the stand- 
point of these men and of the men they repre- 
sent, and that its object is to show that the most 
outspoken modern scholarship ministers to our 
religious needs and to the appreciation of the 
supreme religious value of the Old Testament. 
I do not mean to say that modern scholarship 
has not altered our conception of the religious 
value as well as of the historical accuracy of the 
Old Testament, — we shall begin the considera- 
tion of our subject by pointing out the great 
difference of view that it necessitates, — I only 
mean to say that the gain far exceeds the ap- 
parent loss. 



II 



THE OLDER VIEW OF THE RELIGIOUS VALUE 
OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 

Let me first, then, attempt to set forth the 
chief religious value of the Old Testament to 
the older scholarship and to that scholarship, 
not as it has been modified in the last one hun- 
dred years, but before biblical criticism changed 
its attitude of awe for an attitude of sympathy. 1 

To the older scholarship the Old Testament 
was religiously valuable chiefly in two ways: 
first, it served as one of the most important 
proofs for the existence of God and the divinity 
of Jesus Christ, and second, it gave men infal- 
lible directions in regard to faith and conduct. 
We must consider these two great services in 
turn. 

We cannot follow in detail the proof of the 
existence of God which the Old Testament af- 

1 Cf . Martineau, " The Rationale of Religious Inquiry," 
1836. 

7 



8 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

forded the fathers, but it was chiefly threefold. 
It consisted in the miraculous interventions in 
the course of Jewish history, in the revelation of 
future events to the Jewish prophets, and in the 
early and authoritative proclamation of the per- 
fect morality. Some, if not all, of the older 
divines and scholars insist that o^ these three 
proofs the first two are of decidedly greater value. 
They point out that they are more distinctly 
divine, less open to any human admixture, and 
that they have a wider appeal. A moral law 
impresses only moral people, whereas a miracle 
convinces the wicked as well as the good. 
And certainly if it can be established that the 
dew fell one night on Gideon's fleece and not 
upon the ground, and that the next night it fell on 
the ground and not upon the fleece, and if it may 
be further proved that it all happened because 
Gideon asked God to have it so, the circum- 
stance — particularly when supported by many 
other similar occurrences — proves the existence 
of God much more easily than the delivery of the 
ten commandments to Moses, or certainly more 
easily than the content of the commandments. 



THE OLDER VIEW 9 

The only thing requisite is to be sure that 
the miracles actually happened. Of this the 
older theologians were convinced, because the 
infallible Bible said so. And the Bible was 
proven to be an infallible book by the remark- 
able fulfilment of its most detailed and most 
mysterious prophecies about the future of 
Israel and of Israel's foes. Further, over and 
over again in this book were to be found — 
as in no other with which our fathers were 
acquainted — passages of the highest spiritual 
quality introduced by the solemn " Thus saith 
the Lord." These passages naturally inspired 
reverence for the book in which they were 
found, and from the earliest time it was the 
universal belief that the very accounts of the 
miracles themselves were from the mouth of 
the Lord, written only at the hand of some 
amanuensis. The infallible book proved the 
actuality of the miracle, which in turn proved 
the existence and the power of God. 

The divinity of Christ also was proved, not 
by the words of his mouth or the meditations 
of his heart, but to a very large extent by the 



io RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

Old Testament prophecies of his coming. 
It was, indeed, always felt that the prophecies 
that concerned themselves directly with him 
were meagre and hazy, but this very haze was 
accounted to be an evidence of that God who 
hideth himself and whose ways are not our 
ways. A God who could wipe out whole cities 
at his word and who could tell Abraham 
the exact hour of their destruction could be 
mysterious about the sending of his Son if he 
so elected. There was enough that was clear 
to impress "the fickle and the frail," and enough 
that was covered to necessitate and to repay the 
theologian. In this latter category the ritual 
occupied a prominent place ; in itself it had no 
meaning; it was ridiculous to have so many 
sacred pages filled with the description of mere 
temporary rites; it was the province of the 
theologian to prove that they constituted a de- 
tailed symbolic prophecy of the atonement on 
Calvary. Hence there arose the sacred science 
of typology, which supplemented the meagre- 
ness of the direct Messianic prophecies. Side 
by side herewith, the theologian followed the 



THE OLDER VIEW n 

lead of the writers of the gospels in discovering 
numerous hidden references to Christ where 
a casual reader would not suspect them. This 
allegorical interpretation of Scripture ran riot 
in the early days of the Church and was in great 
favor much more recently than we care to think. 
It was supposed to be a special gift of the 
Spirit, who thereby enabled his favorites to 
find the spiritual significance of seemingly 
secular events. Thus was much of the Old 
Testament redeemed from its worldliness and 
made tributary to the revelation of Christ, 
and to the establishment of his deity. 

But allegorical interpretation is invariably an 
interpretation of an oracle. It was, therefore, 
but a short step from searching for hidden 
references to Christ to searching for hidden 
counsel for one's personal life. The historical 
sense was completely ignored, — at first on prin- 
ciple, at length as a matter of course. The 
Bible became a vast storehouse of moral and 
spiritual food, equally nutritious for all ages, 
and for all circumstances. Many a saint in 



12 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

perplexity would open his Bible for direction, 
and would twist the passage to which he opened 
until he found the guidance he sought. And 
even where this was not done, the "devotional" 
reader would be constantly expecting some 
spiritual refreshment to shoot forth from the 
ritual of Leviticus or the narratives of the Kings. 
Samson's riddle became only one of a vast num- 
ber. The Old Testament became an oracle 
like the books of the Sibyl or the utterances 
from Delphi. Any one of God's children could 
hear him speak to him personally, simply by 
opening the pages of the Old Testament, or as 
it was preferably called, The Word of God. 

It would be utterly absurd for descendants 
of the Puritans to deny that this conception of 
the Old Testament had distinct religious value. 
It made men certain of the existence of God 
and of the divinity of Christ. It kept every- 
day life open to the illumination of God's coun- 
sel. It held men in the control of God. It 
cannot be gainsaid that with the weakening 
of this conception, large numbers of men are 
losing the encouragement and the consolation 



THE OLDER VIEW 13 

of religion. The old divines were right in 
saying that a moral argument appealed only 
to moral men. Where a man is devoid of 
spiritual insight, it will be much harder to 
prove to him the divinity of Jesus from the 
supremacy of his character than from a de- 
tailed prophecy of his coming, death, and 
resurrection, hundreds of years before. 

Again, the character of the prophets is a 
less direct proof of the existence of God, and, 
therefore, of men's accountability to him, than 
the staying of the sun by Joshua, or of the 
processes of a whale's digestion for Jonah. It 
would appear that not only perfect love but 
imperfect conviction of God casteth out fear of 
him. It seems patent that the absolute cer- 
tainty of God is passing away from very large 
numbers of men. The world of Western civili- 
zation appears to be entering on a curious 
epoch. It has been accustomed to irreligion 
in the intellectual circles; now it seems that 
irreligion is rather to have its seat among the 
masses. The problem of the immediate past 
has been with the educated ; the problem of the 



14 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

present is with the indifferent, because uncon- 
vinced, laboring classes. They could find God 
in an infallible church or in an oracular book ; 
now they " wander from sea to sea," but without 
even "seeking the word of the Lord," — so sure 
are they that "they shall not find it." In the 
face of this threatening disaster, we are able 
to appreciate the religious value of the Old 
Testament of the fathers. 



Ill 

DEFECTS OF THIS OLDER VIEW 

Before we turn from the Old Testament 
of our fathers to the Old Testament of our 
critics, we must in fairness point out three seri- 
ous limitations in our fathers' view. First, 
the conception of the Old Testament as the 
inerrant record of the miraculous and the in- 
fallible oracle for all generations prevented men 
from apprehending the actual religion of the 
authors and heroes of the Old Testament. 
Even in the historical books, the search for the 
miraculous blinded men's eyes to the simple 
and affecting greatness of a Saul or of a David 
and to their crude beliefs and fears. The signifi- 
cance of the demand of Elijah for the exclusive 
worship of Jehovah, fraught with such untold 
consequences, was quite overlooked in favor 
of the cruise of oil and the mysterious chariot 
and the wonder-working mantle. 

15 



16 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

This defect is most plainly exhibited in the 
estimate of the prophetic books. They were 
valued almost exclusively for the predictions 
they contained. The figures of the prophets 
themselves were but slightly individualized and 
their struggles and problems commanded no 
sympathy; they were hardly known to exist. 
Only in very recent times has it been discovered 
that the greatest of the prophets were poets, 
and delivered their messages from Jehovah in 
lyric poetry of exquisite beauty and of unparal- 
leled strength. There was a lamentable igno- 
rance of the very portions of Scripture which have 
been shown to be of the highest literary power. 
And as literature is not only an outcome, but 
in large measure an index, of life, we are forced 
to suspect that the older theologians had no real 
understanding of Old Testament religion. It 
was precisely the most vital parts of the book 
for which they had no inner sympathy. And 
the suspicion is confirmed by the reconstruction 
of history which modern criticism has made. 
Through it we have discovered that the creators 
of the Israelitish religion are not so much Abra- 



DEFECTS OF THIS OLDER VIEW 17 

ham and Moses as Amos and Hosea and Jere- 
miah and the unknown authors of Deuteronomy 
and of some of the later chapters of the Book of 
Isaiah. 

The prevalent opinion among scholars is 
that the ten commandments, instead of being 
handed to Moses on Sinai, are the crystalliza- 
tion of the insight of the great prophets of 
Israel. We have found that what gave power 
to the strophes of Amos and Hosea was the sense 
of declaring to Israel what they perhaps thought 
was forgotten, but what was at any rate un- 
known, moral and spiritual truth. We have 
learned that the religion of the Old Testament, 
was neither the religion of the Protestant theo- 
logians nor even of the New Testament. It 
was in such a constant state of development that 
to speak of the religion of the Old Testament 
as though it were a fixed quantity, is a mislead- 
ing use of language. In reality, Hebrew reli- 
gion did not become monotheistic until shortly 
before the fall of Samaria. 

The only glimpses of immortality in the Old 
Testament come from the two centuries pre- 



1 8 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

ceding Christ, and Old Testament religion 
never lost its national character. For a long 
time its chief representatives sought God ex- 
clusively through ritual and the casting of lots, 
worshipped him with the help of images and 
regarded national exaltation as his highest re- 
ward. Hebrew religion was raised to its unique 
place only through the inner experiences of the 
wonderful succession of men, of whose hearts 
and hopes and lonely, steadfast faith the theo- 
logians of the Reformation had no apprehen- 
sion. The first great defect, then, of the older 
view is its failure to realize the religion of the 
men of the Old Testament, and thereby to 
appreciate that our religion was the outcome of 
centuries of struggle after God. 

This emphasis on miracle and prophecy on 
the part of our fathers made also for the exter- 
nalization of religion. It is indeed strange to 
find emphasis on Israelitish prophecy making 
for such a result, but we must remember that 
prophecy was regarded by the old theologians 
as prediction. This prediction had to do largely 
with external events that could easily be verified 



DEFECTS OF THIS OLDER VIEW 19 

by the morally obtuse. The predicters them- 
selves, moreover, were chosen without especial 
regard to their moral attainment, as was pecul- 
iarly evidenced in the case of Balaam. To have 
faith in God meant not to appropriate his holi- 
ness but to believe in his existence and power. 
It was the fact rather than the character of God 
that was of supreme importance. To believe on 
the Lord Jesus Christ meant, not to understand 
what God intended man to be, but rather to be 
confident that the worth of Christ's sacrifice 
balanced our account with the Almighty. It 
was the cross rather than the heart of Jesus 
that was the centre of Christianity. With this 
external view of God and of Christ, it followed 
that eternal life was a mark of duration rather 
than of quality. What was acquired by this 
intellectual — that is, external — acceptance of 
God and Christ was an assurance of pleasurable 
existence after death. In some most rigidly 
orthodox quarters, religion became synony- 
mous with belief. 

But the most serious religious defect in this 
method of regarding the Old Testament was the 



20 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

trivial conception of God that went with it. 
God was supposed to have found in an unchang- 
ing book a completely adequate medium for 
revealing himself to men. He had need of no 
further avenue of communication. Spirit had 
deposited itself in letters. The Bible was 
the surrogate of God. To commune with the 
Almighty, let man dig out the hidden meaning of 
infallible words. A God that was to be found 
in such fashion was of necessity a trivial God. 
The nature of the letters, moreover, in which 
God had, as it were, deposited himself, in- 
creased the triviality of his character. For, as 
we have seen, the only way in which long 
stretches of Chronicles and the Song of Songs 
and Leviticus could be considered worthy of 
being the speech of any God at all was to regard 
them as conveyers of a hidden spiritual mean- 
ing. Even the older theologians were sure that 
for a final and exclusive communication of 
God to men, there was too much in the Old 
Testament about buying wells and measur- 
ing altars and describing meats. Hence it 
was generally assumed that these passages 



DEFECTS OF THIS OLDER VIEW 21 

were intended to convey subtle mysteries 
of redemption. This assumption not only 
relieved the speech of the Almighty from 
seeming lapses, but gave him back again 
that mystery which he had surrendered to the 
clear-cut letters of the Bible, and which men 
must needs feel about their God. Thus the 
obscurity of his verbal revelation was made to 
match the obscurity of Providence, and in a 
double sense he was felt to be "a God that 
hideth himself." But this human method of 
investing Jehovah with mystery only increases 
our sense of his inadequacy. He is freed from 
insisting on the exact measurements of furni- 
ture only by being made a lover of riddles. His 
message to men was thought to be more ade- 
quately conveyed in plays upon words than in 
the mountains and the stars or in the heart 
of man. 

Revelation was thus regarded as something 
quite unnatural and unrelated to the currents 
of the inner life. Only through artifice could 
God reveal himself to his creatures; even his 
Son must be accredited by hidden solutions 



22 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

of prearranged conundrums. No wonder that 
for the simple trustful reverence of Jesus there 
was substituted the belief on the "mysterious" 
dogma of the Trinity. No wonder, further, 
that God was supposed, by processes akin to 
magic, to reveal to men definite directions of an 
arbitrary kind when they found themselves in 
trifling perplexities. Aaron was not allowed 
to enter the holy of holies oftener than twice a 
year ; even the Sibylline books on the Capitoline 
were consulted only at explicit command of the 
Senate ; the God of the older theology, however, 
could always be consulted through the biblical 
oracle at all times, for all causes, by all persons. 
Superstition easily usurped the place of rever- 
ence. The God of an oracle is always to be 
preferred to no God at all, yet he is not a God 
of order but of confusion, and he is far removed 
from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. The greatest evil of an infallible Bible 
is the worship of a trivial God. 



IV 

THE UNTENABILITY OF THE OLDER VIEW 

But with its good and ill alike, our fathers' 
view of the Bible has been found untenable. 
It cannot, of course, be said to have been actually 
disproved. There is no possibility of overturn- 
ing by proof so subjective a belief as the belief 
in the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. 
Every contradiction, every false statement, 
may be set aside simply by asserting that the 
obvious sense of the passage has nothing to do 
with the real significance thereof. But it can 
be said that, in the light of common sense and 
science and comparative religion and historical 
criticism, this method of biblical interpretation 
has been discarded by nearly all educated men. 

Where this view has been given up, and men 
have approached the pages of the Old Testa- 
ment to discover the simple meaning of its 
writers, it is well-nigh universally admitted 

23 



24 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

that the Bible is not an infallible book. At 
many an important crisis in the history of the 
Jews, different, and, in some cases, directly 
conflicting, accounts have been discovered, 
sometimes side by side, sometimes dovetailed 
together by an ancient and anxious editor. As 
both of two opposing accounts cannot be true, 
the theory of biblical inerrancy must be aban- 
doned. It is only necessary to instance the 
two narratives of creation or of the conquest 
of Canaan or of the origin of the monarchy 
in Israel to refute it. Being compelled to re- 
ject the infallibility of the Old Testament, we 
can no longer prove the fact of the existence of 
God by the citation of its miracles. Unless 
we have a supernatural record, we cannot be 
sure of the reality of supernatural events. It 
has, moreover, been observed that the accounts 
of the most stupendous biblical miracles are 
usually much later — in some important cases, 
as in the narratives of the Patriarchs and of the 
Exodus, centuries later — than the times in 
which these wonders are reported to have oc- 
curred. Great providential deliverances, such, 



THE UNTENABILITY OF OLDER VIEW 25 

for instance, as the deliverance of Israel in the 
time of Hezekiah, though they still stand out in 
all their impressiveness, are explainable by 
quite natural causes. 

Nor does prophecy come out more unscathed 
from the fires of modern historical criticism. It 
has been found to be essentially a forthtelling 
rather than a foretelling. Not that the element 
of prediction is absent, — many modern writers 
have erred at this point, — but the prediction of 
doom is based on moral failure, and the predic- 
tion of glory on faith in the love of God and in 
the endurance of his kingdom. In other words 
the predictions are expressions of the moral in- 
sight of majestic men who spake as they were 
moved, not by a magic, but by the Holy, Ghost. 

Wherever this judgment passes from the 
general to the specific, we find unfulfilled, as 
indisputably if not as frequently as fulfilled, 
prophecy. It is only necessary to mention the 
predictions of the restoration and confederation 
of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms in 
Palestine. 1 And at the most important point 
'Hosea i 11 , Jer. so 4 , Ezek. 37 15ff - 



26 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

of all, the prophetic argument is a complete 
failure. It is simply impossible to establish 
from it the divinity and the Messiahship 
of Jesus. A careful study of the Messianic 
prophecy of the Old Testament shows that, 
while a small minority of the prophets antici- 
pated a personal " Messiah," no one of them 
anticipated a figure like that of Christ. The 
only possible exception to this statement is the 
author of the marvellous fifty-third chapter of 
Isaiah, but it is probable that in the "Servant 
of Jehovah" he was personifying the nation of 
Israel. Jesus referred most sparingly to pre- 
dictions of himself in the Old Testament; it 
was the evangelists, and more particularly 
Matthew, that made good this omission. 

And typology, so elaborately developed and 
systematized, is the weakest of all reeds to lean 
upon. On the one hand, the ritual on which it 
is based is found either to be similar to that of 
the other Semitic nations or to be borrowed 
from the ritual of Baal; and on the other hand, 
it is found to have been elaborated in the more 
degenerate times of Jewish history and to have 



THE UNTENABILITY OF OLDER VIEW 27 

been one of the chief objects of prophetic de- 
nunciation. The best that can be said for the 
ritual of the Old Testament in its most de- 
veloped and purified form is that it preserved 
a great religion through times too formal and too 
worldly to appreciate it. We should regard the 
"divinely ordained" ritual, not as the highest 
prophecy of the Messiah, but rather — as ritual 
always is — as an evidence of religious stag- 
nation. Jesus ignored it almost completely. 
In his presence, anise and cummin ceased to be 
important. It is nothing but the simplest truth 
to say that if we were left to the Old Testament 
to prove the Messiahship of Jesus, we should no 
longer be able to accept him as our Lord. 

And it perhaps should be added that the 
"thus saith the Lord's " of the Old Testament 
have lost in impressiveness through the discov- 
eries of the archaeologists. We have found the 
king of Moab as sincerely believing in the 
power and direction of his god, Chemosh, as 
did the Israelite in that of his God, Jehovah. 
There was dug up but the other day a code of 
laws, almost identical in some of its statutes 



28 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

with the code of Moses, antedating it by over a 
thousand years. The stone, moreover, upon 
which the code is inscribed, is headed by a pic- 
ture of its author, Hammurabi, either in the 
act of receiving the law from his god, — in a simi- 
lar fashion to that of Moses, — or indicating by 
the posture of worship that the inspirer of the 
code was a greater than man. And so we have 
come to regard the solemn formula of the proph- 
ets, not as an evidence of a unique experience, 
but as the expression of the sincere conviction 
of honest men, whose conviction has been paral- 
leled frequently, that they were under the guid- 
ance of Deity. In many other respects, illus- 
trated, for example, in the borrowing of the 
material underlying the stories of the creation 
and of the flood from the Babylonians, we find 
the Old Testament to be one of a class, rather 
than an absolutely unique volume. It is not the 
only sacred book of the nations ; it is simply the 
sacred book of the Jews, which many of us, 
however, believe is destined soon to be a part 
of the sacred book of mankind. 



V 



A MODERN VIEW OF THE RELIGIOUS VALUE 
OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 

Now, it is maintained both in rigidly ortho- 
dox quarters and in quarters where they spell 
modern with a capital "M," that with this 
abandonment of the infallibility of the Old 
Testament its religious significance is ex- 
hausted. And it must be frankly admitted 
that we can no longer regard it as a demonstra- 
tion of the existence of God to immoral men, 
nor as a demonstration of the divinity of Christ 
to those unattracted by his person. Nor is this 
an altogether unmixed evil. We instinctively 
recall the words of Paul, the first grave heretic, 
"The natural man receiveth not the things of 
the Spirit of God, for they are spiritually dis- 
cerned,' ' and the unequivocal words of Jesus, 
"Why doth this generation seek a sign? verily 
I say unto you, There shall no sign be given unto 

this generation/' and again, "The kingdom of 

29 



30 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

God cometh not by observation." It may prove 
that the coming of that kingdom is not so much 
impeded as we fear by the diminution of that 
large class who "believe and tremble." Be 
that as it may, I am very confident that the 
Bible, and specifically the Old Testament, may 
still with gratitude and reverence be hailed as 
"the anchor of our purest thoughts, the nurse, 
the guide," in some measure even "the guardian 
of our hearts." And, indeed, the relation of 
the Old Testament to the religious man is not 
unlike the relation which nature bore to the 
rare soul of Wordsworth. It is that constant 
element — objective, if you will — of great 
and sublime beauty, which suggests and inspires 
those abiding visions of the Eternal, which are 
"the soul of all our moral being." It is the 
fixed mountain peak, from which a soul, if it 
ascend on a clear day, may catch sight of "the 
hills where its life rose" and a faint suggestion 
at least "of the sea where it goes." 

This essay would sadly outgrow its limits, 
and overtask its author, should it attempt 
to set forth thoroughly the religious values of 



A MODERN VIEW 31 

the Old Testament, which criticism has either 
confirmed or uncovered. It will be best to 
confine our attention to three fundamental ser- 
vices which the Old Testament, in the modern 
understanding of it, is destined to render to 
men of our time. 

The first great and permanent service that 
the Old Testament renders to a man is that it 
presents to him personalities worthy of the pro- 
foundest reverence. The beginning of all 
ethical religion is the awakening of reverence. 
This is occasioned by contact with persons of 
moral earnestness and religious insight. For 
all of us our religion began with the initial 
trust we reposed in our parents. But both they 
and our personal friends are too close to us to 
call out that reverence for character, detached 
completely from its worth to ourselves, that is 
distinctively religious. The Old Testament 
affords even the most unfortunately circum- 
stanced among us characters which are so great, 
and whose greatness lies so patently in their 
relation to God, that we are inevitably led to 
ascribe to them supreme worth. Of all ages 



32 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

and of diversest gifts, they stand out more plas- 
tically than the apostles and more massively 
than the heroes of other races. It is the patient 
scholarship of our time that has rendered their 
individualities intelligible and self-consistent. 
It has set them in their proper historical environ- 
ment and has separated the later narratives of 
their doings from the earlier ones. It has made 
plain to us the greatness of these men. It has 
shown that greatness to consist in their loyalty 
to the highest ideals of their time, in the zeal 
with which they performed their divinely or- 
dered tasks, and, above all, in a religious insight 
which enabled them to live just enough beyond 
their time to lead it forward toward ours. 
Their problems and their capacities have been 
sufficiently disclosed to us to convince us that 
God spoke to them more plainly than he speaks 
to us, but only because they had a greater faith, 
a deeper loyalty to right, and a more unconscious 
devotion to their race than we. There is no rea- 
son why our time should not be as close to God 
as theirs. There is nothing that has brought 
it closer than this discovery of its possibilities. 



A MODERN VIEW S3 

Out of the large number of men which in- 
spire our reverence, let us take David for an 
example. Modern scholarship has given us the 
background necessary to an appreciation of his 
remarkable character. We shall never make 
anything out of David unless we remember that 
he belonged generically to Oriental despots. He 
had a large harem, he cast lots superstitiously in 
the deciding of grave questions, he did not hesi- 
tate to exact a bandit's booty because he had 
kept his men from stealing sheep, he made the 
inhabitants of conquered towns pass under saws 
and hammers and through the terrible brick- 
kiln. He does not satisfy the lowest standards 
of to-day; but if we understand his time, he 
comes before us as nearer God than many a 
man of higher standards. 

Of course, as long as we conceive such a man, 
so cruel and so sensual, to be the author of the 
exquisite twenty-third Psalm, it is impossible 
to regard him as self-consistent or to allow his 
personality any save a sentimental influence 
over our lives. His ode on the death of Saul 
gives us the key to his character. While it 



34 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

makes no explicit mention of Jehovah, it re- 
veals a superb loyalty to a king that unjustly 
sought his very life and a love passing that 
of women for the friend of his youth. He did 
not worship the God of the prophets though he 
had the same name for him ; he was not capable 
of so exalted a conception ; but his personality 
did much to create the ideals of manhood that 
supported such a conception. Even to this day 
fraternal societies can find no loftier type of 
brotherhood than his affection for Jonathan, 
nor Christian ministers higher words of con- 
solation to parents in bereavement than those 
in which this semi-barbarian expressed his 
submission to Deity. His care for his parents, 
his decree that those who stayed by the stuff 
should share the spoil with those that had been 
in the thick of the fray, his unchangeable affec- 
tion for the son he knew was a traitor, — all 
these were the highest manifestations of the 
virtues of his day. 

But the depth of his own loyalty led him to 
religious conceptions in advance of those of his 
time. He had the power of discrimination in 



A MODERN VIEW 35 

ritualistic values, so much more important in 
his day than in ours. He did not hesitate an 
instant to eat holy bread to save his life, or to 
defy the wrath of an angry plague- sending 
God for the marvellous mother-love of Rizpah ; 
but he risked death rather than slay the Lord's 
anointed, though a king was something quite new 
to Israel and without any traditional sanctity. 
He had an inner standard by which he instinc- 
tively tested the elements of the religion of his 
time. Perhaps his highest moment was when 
he sent back the sacred ark to Jerusalem, then 
in possession of his son, Absalom, with words 
which seem to have pushed the human race 
leagues along in its search for God: " Carry 
back the ark of God into the city ; if I shall find 
favor in the eyes of the Lord, he will show me 
again both it and his habitation ; but if he say, 
I have no delight in thee, behold here am I, 
let him do as seemeth good unto him." He 
would not risk the home of Jehovah upon the 
rectitude of his rule ; he still thought of him as 
residing in ark and city ; but the consciousness 
of his unswerving loyalty to God led him to 



36 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

hope that somehow God, whose holiest dwelling 
was with his enemy, would find a way to be 
loyal to him. 

Thus was the insight of his steadfast heart 
keen enough to pierce the theology of centuries 
and to break through the weight of custom, 
"heavy as frost and deep almost as life." The 
very man who at the beginning of his career 
besought Saul to permit him to stay in Judah, 
that he might not be cut off from the only soil 
upon which God could be worshipped, learned 
through the profound qualities of his own spirit, 
that its God is not confined to any dwelling- 
place however sacred it be. It is not theoretical 
speculation, but the experience of an untutored 
barbarian of large heart and of tumultuous life, 
that gave rise to the first words that shine 
with "the peace that passeth understanding." 
When the modern man of culture bows before 
a hero of barbaric times, he has a glimpse of 
eternal values. 

Or take once more, before we leave this por- 
tion of our subject, the grandest personality of 
the Old Testament, the prophet Jeremiah. I 



A MODERN VIEW 37 

wish there were space to rehearse the story of 
his life as it lies so confusedly but so grandly 
outlined in his great prophecy. It is a story 
too subtle, too emotional, too inwardly tumul- 
tuous, to abbreviate with success. I can only 
hope to direct some readers — perhaps under 
the guidance of Duhm or Cornill — to an in- 
telligent study of the prophecy which, though 
complicated by additions from later ages, has 
still the power to bring us into touch with a 
man in whom faith achieved one of its most 
notable victories. 

Jeremiah was a country priest, timid and de- 
siring solitude. "A lodging place for way- 
farers in the wilderness" was his idea of hap- 
piness. The first part of his life fell in the time 
of Josiah, who was the leader in one of the most 
radical religious revolutions known to history, 
and yet we hear no single word of this from 
Jeremiah. His soul was untouched by it. 
During its progress he received his call from 
God through an intense inward persuasion of 
the coming destruction of his people. To a 
people that had passed through the throes of 



38 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

a religious transformation, and who thought 
themselves reformed, he was constrained to 
proclaim the displeasure of God because of their 
ineradicable iniquity ; to a people casting wildly 
about for some means of maintaining their 
independence, he proclaimed that it was Je- 
hovah's will that they should submit to haughty 
Babylon. It was a message foredoomed to 
rejection, a message that the utterer would fain 
have left unspoken, a message that exposed the 
messenger to continuous obloquy. But it was 
a message that had taken complete possession 
of his soul. The only dim hope he saw for his 
people lay in their readjustment of their na- 
tional ideals to the inevitable, with the immov- 
able conviction that God was behind it. He 
realized the insuperable difficulties of persuad- 
ing a self-satisfied populace to rise to a faith 
so heroic and so indefinite. But he regarded 
himself as the mouthpiece of the Almighty. 
He was beyond his own control. From the call 
to deliver such a message he shrank at the out- 
set, but he was over-mastered by the Omnipo- 
tent. "O Lord," he cries, "thou hast enticed 



A MODERN VIEW 39 

me and I was enticed ; thou art stronger than I 
and hast prevailed." He excuses his course to 
his diary thus, "If I say, I will not make men- 
tion of him nor speak any more in his name, 
then there is in my heart a burning fire shut 
up in my bones and I am weary with forbearing 
and can no longer be still." So with eyes open 
to the consequences and with a heart open to 
God, he proclaimed, in season and out of season, 
his message of gloom. When the nation was at 
peace and gathered for worship, when the king 
was plotting with Egypt against the Babylonian 
inevitable, when the very armies of B ably on 
surrounded the city and the whole populace 
was aroused for its defence, in his native town, 
in private before the weak and unstable Zede- 
kiah or among his two or three disciples, in 
public in the very guard room where the sol- 
diers were preparing for war against the Baby- 
lonian advance, — everywhere and at all times 
he thundered forth his message. Over and over 
he was arrested, imprisoned, made fast in the 
stocks ; once he was thrown into the lowest dun- 
geon to sink in the mire ; for a long period he 



40 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

was threatened with death by his own towns- 
men. Through all contumely he remained 
steadfast. At last, as he had predicted, the 
arms of Babylon were successful; andthecon- 
querers, on hearing of his course, treated him 
with marked distinction. While his revilers 
received the due reward of their deeds, the 
man who had done nothing amiss was offered 
a career of prominence in Babylon. 

But the prophet refused to believe that the 
enjoyment of such luxury and repose was the 
purpose of his vindication. Turning his back 
unhesitatingly on all such preferment, with great 
joy he undertook to live in Palestine with a rem- 
nant of Israel which was not worth the while of 
Babylon to deport, but from which he expected 
to see the new Israel arise. His hope, however, 
was short-lived. The new Babylonian governor 
of Palestine was murdered by a fanatic. Fear- 
ing that the crime would be laid to their charge, 
the Jews of Palestine, thoroughly terrified, sent 
a delegation to Jeremiah, whom events had 
accredited as a true prophet, to receive the 
word of God. After many days of waiting, 



A MODERN VIEW 41 

they received from him the message God had 
finally vouchsafed; they should remain in the 
land of Jehovah and trust in his protection. 
Their fears had increased, however, during the 
delay, and in spite of the counsel of Jeremiah, 
they moved out in solid ranks to that Egypt 
which had constantly lured them to ruin. 

The new Judea for which he had toiled and in 
which he had believed was not to be. The men 
of Israel may have hoped that with a favora- 
ble Egyptian alliance their independence might 
be restored. Or they may have abandoned 
all ambition for the sake of comfortable living 
in Egypt. In any case they were more inter- 
ested in themselves than in righteousness. But 
even with this outlook, the prophet was true 
to his message. He went in duress with these 
people to Egypt rather than as governor of 
others to Babylon. The last glimpse we have 
of him is of a man prophesying in Egypt 
the universal sway of Babylon as a part of the 
plan of Jehovah. He was faithful unto death, 
a death so obscure that its time and place are 
unknown. But from him the world learned 



42 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

what every attentive reader of his book still 
feels, the unmatched grandeur of faith in per- 
formance of a duty whose utility is hidden 
from men's eyes. 

It is difficult to overestimate the effects in the 
history of the inner life of mankind that rever- 
ence for the character of Jeremiah has pro- 
duced. The truth of his insight and the nobility 
of his faith so impressed the Jews that his words 
were carefully preserved as words of Jehovah. 
In their own despite, they canonized a man who 
proved to them that faith has its reward in the 
heart and not in the market. More and more 
through the centuries of disappointment they 
were drawn to him as the incarnation of the 
Jewish spirit. More and more they revered a 
faith so instinctive and so majestic that it asked 
for nothing but God. It is recorded that one 
of the greatest of the Maccabean victories was 
won through a vision in which he was seen 
handing the sword to their leader. It is not 
unlikely that he may have been in the thoughts 
of the author of the book of Job; and some 
modern scholars believe that he was the model 



A MODERN VIEW 43 

for the picture of the Servant of Jehovah in 
the immortal fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. 1 It 
seems incredible that Jesus, who knew and ap- 
plied to himself a prophecy of Isaiah, should 
not have had his mission made clear to him by 
those words which helped many men in the first 
centuries to receive him as the Messiah : — 

" Surely he bore our griefs, 
And carried our sorrows: 
Yet we did esteem him stricken, 
Smitten of God and afflicted. 

" But he was wounded for our transgressions, 
He was bruised for our iniquities: 
The chastisement of our peace was upon him; 
And with his stripes we are healed. " 

It is then by no means impossible to connect 
Jeremiah with Calvary; and we are not as- 
tonished to find that Jesus was mistaken, by 
one who revered him greatly, for the prophet 
Jeremiah, risen from the dead. 

If any one wants to receive the grace of hu- 
mility, "the highest virtue, mother of them all," 
and to recover the fading glory of reverence, I 

1 Cf., for example, Cornill, "Das Buch Jeremia," 1905. 



44 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

know no surer method than by living in the 
atmosphere of the Old Testament, with men like 
Moses and Isaiah, Barak and Elijah, David 
and Jeremiah, with men who convince us that 
the noblest character, both in modern and in 
ancient times, is that which tremblingly con- 
fesses that it is the product of the Spirit of God. 
The two men of whom I have written are, of 
course, far too great for my words to actualize. 
But no man of moral perception and of spiritual 
longing can study for six months the books of 
Samuel or the prophecies of Jeremiah without 
getting a new heart or at least a new song. 

This transcendent service of the Old Testa- 
ment, in presenting to us personalities that in- 
cite profound reverence, is as enduring as virtue 
and is utterly independent of changing scientific 
and philosophical views. 



The second permanent religious service that 
the Old Testament renders mankind is to 
record the discovery of the most fundamental 
truths of our religion. 



A MODERN VIEW 45 

The modern study of history has shattered 
two widespread notions of the origin of religion. 
The older of these held that God revealed in 
the centuries between Adam and Moses the 
entire content of religion. The main signifi- 
cance of Christ was that he revealed more clearly 
and in final form what had been in the minds of 
the Patriarchs and of Moses. The primitive 
practices of the period of the Judges and of 
great heroes like Gideon and David were either 
not clearly understood — fixed ideas are opaque 
glasses through which to read history — or ex- 
plained as wilful departures from the ethical 
monotheism of the primitive times. It is only 
quite recently that the discovery has been made 
that the reason for a higher conception of God 
in parts of Genesis than in parts of Samuel lies 
in the fact that they were written later. Our 
fathers are not to be blamed for their opinions. 
They were but following the lead of the Hebrew 
editors of the Pentateuch, who themselves 
credited the patriarchs with the conceptions of 
the prophets and of Ezra. They were sure that 
the omnipotent God would not have withheld 



46 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

from his favorites the sublime truths which 
these editors assumed them to be capable of 
grasping. But it has now been conclusively 
proven that the Hebrew religion, which we have 
inherited, is a product of long development 
rather than a revelation to three or four men at 
the dawn, or before the dawn, of history. 

The other theory of religion that has been 
shattered lies embedded in the phrase " Natural 
Religion" and has, perhaps, its most conspicu- 
ous representative in the person of Rousseau. 
It is the theory held in common by the Deists 
of England and by the theologians of the Ger- 
man Aufklarung. It postulated that a right- 
eous and merciful God, a high sense of moral 
obligation, and the hope of immortality were 
the property of mankind at creation ; that, while 
not given by special revelation, as the older the- 
ologians surmised, they were an inalienable part 
of the constitution of the race. To recover the 
true religion, it was necessary only to remove the 
debris of history and disclose the heart of primi- 
tive man. But an intelligent study of the He- 
brew Scriptures alone is enough to show that 



A MODERN VIEW 47 

this is utterly false. The hope of immortality 
is clearly a late conception among the Jews, 
and the sublime Jehovah of the prophets was 
as unknown to Samson as to Agamemnon. 

Our God is a Being gradually discovered by 
the tremendous struggles of the men whose lives 
and whose glorious enthusiasm on emergence 
into the light the Old Testament alone of all 
books describes. This is the reason why the 
Old Testament will endure and will be indis- 
pensable in the creation of character forever. 
No religious truth can be grasped by the intel- 
lect. To be discovered in its essential grandeur, 
it must be seen by the eyes of the heart. It is 
only the Old Testament that enables us to 
appreciate the moral worth of the truths of our 
religion, because only through it may we enter 
into the enthusiasm and witness the moral 
transformation of those majestic souls who dis- 
covered these truths. 

Let us take, for example, the sovereignty of 
God. We take it for granted and fancy we 
understand its significance. But until, through 



48 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

the mediation of the Old Testament, we stand 
close by the man who made it the eternal prop- 
erty of the race, we no more understand its 
supporting pillars and its tremendous propor- 
tions than the foolish Israelites of the court of 
Jeroboam II. They believed in the power of 
Jehovah. Under Jeroboam their country had 
advanced very greatly in extent and power. 
The court was full of prophets who assured them 
of the approach of the Day of Jehovah, in which 
Israel should rule over the proud kingdoms 
that had oppressed them and Jehovah over the 
boasting gods of the nations. They believed 
in the might of Jehovah because it was tradi- 
tional to believe therein and because recent 
events in history gave color to such belief. So 
we may believe in the sovereignty of God be- 
cause we read it in the creeds and because there 
are certain mental and historical facts that bear 
it out. But until we have joined the crowd over 
which Amos, with the enthusiasm of a dis- 
coverer, thundered forth the truth, until we 
have been mastered by the majesty of his soul, 
and entered wonderingly into sympathy with his 



A MODERN VIEW 49 

sublime revelation, we do not understand the 
sovereignty of God. Before Amos, the Old 
Testament is the book of God ; after him, it is 
the book of Almighty God. Before him, it was 
the great record of men striving to find a holy 
God ; after him it is the record of men who had 
found him. The Old Testament after Amos 
is rocked and swayed by the colossal discovery 
of that moral world that is created by the idea 
of the Unity of God. He is the first prophet 
whose words have, some of them, come to us 
in their original form. The crashing thunder- 
ous numbers of Hebrew prophecy seem, there- 
fore, quarried from the soul of the man who 
rose to such a conception of the holiness of Je- 
hovah that he was forced to give over the whole 
world to his rule. To the Israelites reposing in 
their sole election by Jehovah he announces : 

" You alone have I known of all the tribes of the earth, 
Therefore from you will I have satisfaction for all 
your iniquities." 

To the men who granted Jehovah some power 
in nature, he proclaimed : — 



50 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

" For Adonai Jahveh of Hosts — 
He toucheth the earth and it melteth 
And all its inhabitants mourn ; 
He buildeth his chambers in heaven 
And foundeth his vault upon earth; 
For the waters of ocean he calleth 
And poureth them over earth's surface; 
Jahveh is his name." * 

Irritated beyond poetic measure by the arro- 
gance of the provincials, Amos in the midst of 
his glorious wrath gives birth to absolute mono- 
theism in that stinging sentence: "Are ye not 
as the Ethiopian children to me, ye children 
of Israel? Have I not brought up not only 
Israel from Egypt, but also the Philistines from 
Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir?" I am 
the God of your enemy as well as of yourselves. 
What was it in the soul of this man that 
startled the earth into a new epoch and eventu- 
ally gave the world to his God ? Who shall 
say? But that it was moral splendor that was 
the creator of this religious faith, these words 

1 I have not seen my way clear to subscribe to the 
almost universal opinion that the " Nature-Poems " of 
Amos are later interpolations. 



A MODERN VIEW 51 

reveal, poured forth to a very religious folk 
in the midst of their ceremonies : — 

" Woe to those eager for the Day of Jahveh ! 
What is it to you, that Day of Jahveh? 
That Day shall be darkness; it shall not be light, 
Yea, sunless gloom, and not glittering splendor ! 

" Your feasts I hate, I despise. 
Your festal assemblies I loathe. 
The noise of thy songs remove. 
Thy harp-music let me not hear: 
As waters let justice run down, 
Uprightness as a stream never failing." 

Monotheism could arise only from a perfectly 
unified experience that felt about it the con- 
straint of the inevitable. The only pillars that 
can carry so tremendous a structure as mono- 
theism are moral monoliths. And it tolerates 
no others. Amos was the spiritual father of 
Kant. The philosopher set himself to the 
demolition of the arguments of the metaphysi- 
cians for the existence of God because he saw 
that they were incapable of so great a task. 
Then upon the imperative of his moral nature 
he built again the walls to carry the faith of 
humanity. But in so doing he was only revert- 



52 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

ing to Amos, who, ignorant of the arguments 
that Kant discarded and a stranger to the long 
centuries of moral endeavor that produced the 
philosopher, found God, twenty-five hundred 
years earlier, just as confidently out of the 
strength and imperiousness of his vision of 
righteousness. Although he did not know it, 
the greatest of philosophers was but confirming 
the discovery of the first great Hebrew prophet. 
To apprehend monotheism we must realize 
the solidity of the foundation stones on which 
it is builded, and these lie disclosed in no la- 
boriously wrought system of thought, but, fresh- 
hewn and rugged, only in the strophes of the 
book of the prophet Amos. 

Take once more — for we can only touch the 
borders of our vast subject — the conception 
of the love of God. No more than the sov- 
ereignty of God was it the property of man 
either by nature or by revelation at the outset. 
Like that conception, it had a long prenatal his- 
tory in the womb of the race. But like that 
also, it came into life at one point in the his- 
tory of our religion. And that point is to be 



A MODERN VIEW 53 

found not in the speculations of the theologian, 
not in the ritual of the temple, not in the rap- 
ture of spring-time nor in the common joy of 
harvest, but in the heart of a man who was 
made a prophet by the persistence of his love 
for a faithless wife. For not as an allegory, 
whose rise would then be unexplainable, but as 
the most literal fact, do I, in company with 
many modern writers, regard the pathetic story 
of the prophet Hosea. 

In the company of Hosea, we do not, in the 
phrase of Jeremy Taylor, have to practise the 
presence of God. Released from our own 
imaginations and from all mystical exercises 
of our spirits, we immediately are ushered into 
the audience room of the Eternal. Living in 
the same great eighth century before Christ, a 
younger contemporary of Amos, he caught the 
righteousness of the earlier prophet to his heart 
and warmed it there with love. In Hosea, the 
deepest personal grief of man becomes the 
means of creating the conception of a righteous 
God, who loves sinners. Hosea was not the 
first man who had an unfaithful wife, nor the 



54 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

first, who, after discovering her unfaithfulness, 
still loved her with jealous and animal devotion. 
But, so far as we know, he was the first who 
loved so impure a woman with so pure an 
affection. Hosea did not cast off Gomer as 
King Arthur did Guinevere. His love refused 
to let her go. Through the long years of her 
harlotry he pursued her, and, when all her gay 
lovers had forsaken her, he took her into his 
home, buying her in open market as a slave. 
And after all is done and the inevitable redemp- 
tion accomplished, this humble victor out of the 
profound depths of his life perceives his love to 
be a symbol of God's own. Hosea is forced 
with joy to confess that his love for Gomer is 
no more patient and certainly can be no more 
triumphant than Jehovah's for Israel. It is 
a misfortune that the prophecies of Hosea have 
come to us in so corrupt a text and weighted 
down with so many additions. But every now 
and then a few lines of exquisite beauty are 
revealed. The second chapter of the book, 
though sadly marred, is full of the lyrical ten- 
derness we might expect in the poem which is 



A MODERN VIEW 55 

the record of man's discovery of the change- 
less love of God. Mindful of the way of his 
own love, he reveals God's method of redeem- 
ing Israel in words which he does not hesitate 
to lay in the very mouth of God himself. 

"Behold, I will hedge her way with thorns 
And fence her about with walls 
So that she may not find her paths. 
She shall pursue her lovers, 
But she shall not overtake them. 
In vain shall she seek them. 
Then, behold, I will allure her, 
I will lead her to the wilderness, 
I will speak home to her heart, 
And there will I give her vineyards, 
The vale of Achor as a gate of hope. 
As in her youth will she answer me, 
As in the days when she came out of Egypt." 

Hosea is not content with the revenge of 
the Almighty ; his love has taught him the emp- 
tiness of such a victory as Amos would have 
God win ; he is content with nothing less than 
redemption, and knowing that love cannot de- 
grade, he sets forth God as the wooer of shame- 
less Israel. Thus doth human love reveal its 
right in the holy of holies. The lot of Hosea 



56 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

was cast in evil times, and, like all the prophets, 
he is forced to denunciation ; but through all 
the attacks on idolatry and iniquity in the re- 
mainder of the book we find the plaintive note 
recurring again and again. It is thus that the 
Almighty utters himself : — 

"When Israel was a child, then I loved him; 
It was I that taught him to walk; 
I took him in my arms. 

" How can I give thee up, Ephraim, 
How shall I abandon thee, Israel? 
How make of thee an Admah? 
How let thee share Zeboim's fate? 
My heart is changed within me, 
My compassions are kindled together. 
I will not act in burning wrath ; 
I will not set out to destroy Ephraim. 
For God am I and no man. 

" I will heal their faithlessness, 
I will love them freely ." 

Here we may feel something of the wonder 
and the transport that dwelt in the man whose 
love for a woman was so holy that he started 
a whole race on its great journey to the heart of 
God. Only as a man stands by the wondering 



A MODERN VIEW 57 

prophet can he grasp the significance of believ- 
ing in the love of God. 

Amos and Hosea are conspicuous, but after 
all typical, examples of the service of the Old 
Testament in revealing to men the full sig- 
nificance of the essential elements of our reli- 
gion. And even where the great conceptions 
— for they are not many — do not come to such 
unique expression out of the lips of distinct 
individuals, the religious reader is continually 
conscious of moving in creative times. The 
Old Testament introduces us to the beginnings 
of personal communion with God. This is 
harder to trace than the birth of the great truths 
of the sovereignty and love of God. While 
it is true that adumbrations of these ideas are 
to be found in many parts of the Bible, they 
may be said to have emerged into the light out 
of the experience of the prophets Amos and 
Hosea. 

But it is somewhat hard to say when 
an Israelite first approached God for himself 
instead of for his nation or as a part of his na- 
tion. It is easy to see that at the beginning of 



58 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

Israelitish history religion was a national thing ; 
in spite of the curious endeavors of some critics, 
it is clear that in the Psalter religion is an indi- 
vidual thing. It may indeed be that this ten- 
dency never fully revealed itself until Jesus 
came, but that it had begun in Old Testament 
times is evident. In the earliest Hebrew song 
that has come to us, — the "song of Deborah, " 
— we find individuals singled out for remem- 
brance before Jehovah for their services to his 
people in war. The grotesque Samson defi- 
nitely calls upon Jehovah for aid in overthrow- 
ing the pillars that uphold the temple of the 
Philistines. He seems thus early to have dis- 
pensed with oracle and image and priest in 
converse with his God. But we must remember 
that there are grave doubts as to the meaning 
and historicity of the story of Samson, even 
should we not share these doubts ourselves. 
In any case it is to be noted that Samson called 
upon Jehovah as the national God to aid him in 
a deed that would avenge his people. But 
with David we come upon one whose individ- 
uality was so powerful that he called upon Jeho- 



A MODERN VIEW 59 

vah, not merely for aid in national crises, but 
for relief in his own personal sorrows. It is 
true that in national concerns he employed a 
priest to consult a tenderly prized oracle to 
discover the issues of war. In his pursuit by 
Saul, too, his actions were governed by the out- 
come of Abiathar's consultation of the ephod ; 
but at least twice the need of his heart was so 
great that he dared to ignore all priestly sentries 
in his approach to the presence of his God. He 
loved a child so much that he prayed and fasted 
many days in the hope that Jehovah would spare 
its life, evidently not for the sake of Israel, but for 
the sake of his love. And, although he danced 
before the ark on its return to Jerusalem be- 
cause he believed that he was then dancing before 
Jehovah, we nevertheless find him believing 
that God would save his life, if he so pleased, 
even though the ark was in the possession 
of his enemy. It appears therefore that, at the 
great crises of his life, he felt that neither God 
nor he was bound by ecclesiastical machinery. 1 

1 It must be recognized, however, that no actual prayer of 
his has been preserved, and that the phrase in 2 Samuel 12 16 , 



60 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

In the story of Elijah, again of uncertain date 
and embellished with legendary additions, we 
find that its author believed Jehovah to be con- 
cerned about the life of the prophet, and that he 
thought it natural for the prophet to beseech 
God to make good to a woman the kindness 
she had shown him. But with Jeremiah, 
the personal communion of God enters on 
a deeper phase. He does not simply beseech 
God for his life. He throws himself upon 
God and pours out his soul before him. Well- 
hausen is not far wrong when he says: "In 
the midst of his pain and agony, there arose 
the certainty of his personal communion with 
the Deity ; the deepest essence of personal reli- 
gion was set free through him. He is the father 
of true prayer in which the frail soul expresses 
its less than human * misery and its more than 
human confidence." 2 He bears the indignities 
from his people and scorns the treasures that 

"he besought God for the child,' ' may not be meant as 
spiritually as we suppose ; he may even then have besought 
him through an ephod. 

1 Untermenschliches. 

2 " Israelitische and Judische Geschichte," 1901, p. 147. 



A MODERN VIEW 61 

have blinded their eyes, in order that he may 
still hear the speech of God. He is the first 
Israelite whose personal prayers, written by 
himself in the midst of his prophecies for the 
nation, have come down to us. He laments 
his loneliness and his fate, evidently feels the 
distinction between himself and his people, 
and apparently intercedes for them. His soul 
is so completely filled with the majesty of being 
the mouthpiece of God that he cannot but pour 
out his complaints before him. And we feel 
that from these outpourings of soul he goes back 
to his task strengthened and uplifted. 

Yet communion is still imperfect. There 
is no real joy in God ; only a sense of his right- 
eousness and his irresistible power over the 
nation and over the prophet's will. It is still 
only the nation that is immortal, only Israel 
that is the real object of the plan of God. Had 
Jeremiah not been engrossed in the fate of his 
nation, he might have felt that sense of the 
injustice of God in his dealings with himself 
that comes to the surface in the Psalms and in 
the Book of Job. Only when the soul is im- 



62 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

mortal and stands before the eternal God can 
real communion exist; only then are joy and 
faith possible. But the Jews were pushed on- 
ward toward the belief in immortality largely 
by the necessity of discriminating between the 
men who served God and those that scoffed 
at him. And it was undoubtedly the prophets 
who, looming so large before them, and so 
differently estimated by various groups of the 
people, forced the emphasis from national suc- 
cess to individual faithfulness to God and to 
righteousness. 

A long development preceded the Lord's 
Prayer, and the two throw light on each other. 
It is only we who have the Lord's Prayer that 
can rightly estimate the long tarrying in the 
outskirts of prayer, it is only we who 
can see the vastness of the contribution 
these men were making to human life ; on the 
other hand, the Lord's Prayer is even more 
gratefully offered when we realize both the 
silence and the stammering that preceded it. 
It is only as we share the struggle after truth 
and the enthusiasm at its initial discovery, it is 



A MODERN VIEW 63 

only as we apprehend the grandeur of the men 
out of whose hearts the foundation stones of 
our religion were quarried, that we apprehend 
the significance of the truth and the holiness 
of our faith. 

The Old Testament permits us thus to stand at 
the cradle of the great fundamental ideas that 
have sanctified human life. They are now so 
ingrained in the texture of humanity that it is 
hard to believe that they were not always there. 
It is but recently that historical criticism has 
let us a little way into the secret of their dis- 
covery. In comparison with the conception of 
the unity of God, of the changeless tenderness 
of his love and of the imperativeness of duty, 
all other ideas are secondary. It is the Old 
Testament alone which enables the soul to par- 
take in the discovery of the great foundations 
upon which Jesus Christ so confidently erected 
the Kingdom of God. 

But the question may well be raised: Why 
is it necessary for us, who, whatever our pecul- 
iar intellectual mood at the moment may be, 



64 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

form our lives and are ruled in our spirits by 
these ideas, — why is it necessary for us to read 
continually of the record of their discovery? 
We do not find it necessary to our intellectual 
development to be forever reading Darwin and 
Koch and the diaries of Columbus; why 
should it be necessary to our religious develop- 
ment to be constantly reading the Old Testa- 
ment? 

The answer has already been partly given. 
For it is clear that the stuff out of which Colum- 
bus and Koch and Darwin made their discov- 
eries — the face of nature — is still the object 
of attentive study by all who are interested in 
their discoveries; they must verify them for 
themselves. But the stuff out of which the 
great spiritual discoveries were made is the 
souls of the discoverers, of the men whose rec- 
ords are preserved in the pages of the Old 
Testament. It was the soul of Amos from 
which the conception of a righteous God was 
taken; it was the suffering love of Hosea for 
his sinful wife that was the stuff in which 
the love of God was first discovered; it was 



A MODERN VIEW 65 

the heart of Jesus Christ that gave rise to the 
final conception of the Fatherhood of God. 
Religious discoveries are wholly personal ; they 
are made by men from their own hearts ; and 
in reliance on what is written there, they defy 
the world. 

One of the surest methods of verification 
of spiritual truth is close understanding of 
the souls that were profound and pure enough 
to disclose it. A scientific discovery may be 
perfected by the generations which succeed 
the discoverer ; a religious discovery is always 
clearest and mightiest in the soul of the dis- 
coverer ; indeed we may in a sense assert that 
whereas a scientific truth may be verified, 
a religious truth must be imparted. That 
is doubtless the underlying meaning of the 
Sacrament, which the author of the fourth 
gospel so profoundly expressed in the words: 
"Except ye eat the flesh and drink the blood 
of the Son of Man, ye have no life in yourselves." 
The only method of obtaining the belief of 
Jesus is to share his Spirit. If this be so, the 
unique religious value of the Old Testament 



66 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

is clearly seen and is well-nigh impossible to over- 
estimate. In recording the discoveries of the 
fundamental truths of our religion, it preserves 
in a very important sense the truths themselves. 



The third great service that the Old Testa- 
ment renders mankind is that it affords the 
presuppositions that are indispensable to ap- 
prehend the character of Christ. It is the Old 
Testament religion that Christ came to fulfil. 
It is as necessary to understand what the mate- 
rial was which Christ completed as the method 
of his completion. Christ was addressing a 
definite situation. It was a nation of very 
strong and definite religious conviction to which 
he spoke. We do not understand him unless 
we understand the effect which his words pro- 
duced upon the people to whom they were 
uttered. It is impossible to gain a complete 
idea of Jesus and his purposes from the Gospels 
alone. We must understand the problems of 
his own time and the deepest spirit of his race. 
To understand the Christian ideal, it is almost 



A MODERN VIEW 67 

as essential to appreciate what Jesus took for 
granted as what he felt it necessary to add. 
His God was the God of Abraham and Isaac 
and Jacob. He had come, not to destroy, but 
to fulfil. He was put to death because he 
claimed to be the one in whom the hopes of 
the prophets culminated. 

It is as impossible, therefore, to understand 
the purpose and spirit of Jesus without some- 
thing of his reverence for the Old Testament 
and something of his intimacy with it, as it 
would be to understand a proposed amend- 
ment to a constitution without a knowledge of 
the original constitution, or to comprehend an 
advanced course in physics without studying 
the elementary laws of heat and light. The 
most fatal misapprehensions of Jesus are those 
that fail to see the spirit of the Old Testament 
in all his ideas and deeds. All his words of 
grace and love are caricatured in our apprehen- 
sion of them unless we remember that they were 
addressed to a people that hungered and thirsted 
for righteousness. He was still insistent that 
it was to destruction that the easy way led. 



68 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

The errors that he corrected in the Old Testa- 
ment were created by searching for substitutes 
for righteousness, not by undue insistence 
thereon. He came to bestow upon men a power 
to attain righteousness that the scribes had 
missed. He was the Messiah of the Jews, be- 
cause he revealed to men the splendor of right- 
eousness and because he planted it in their hearts. 
The old commentators were right in believ- 
ing that Jesus fulfilled prophecy; they were 
wrong in not placing the emphasis upon the 
fundamental in prophecy, but upon mere acci- 
dents of verbiage or of foretelling. What 
was the reason why Jesus appeared in 
Palestine rather than in India or in Japan? 
The reason is the Old Testament. The 
reason is that in Israel men sought com- 
munion with God and that they sought 
it through the discovery and the doing 
of his will. From beginning to end the Old 
Testament is a book of a great moral emotion. 
It is not content with contemplation. It knows 
nothing of the immanence of God. It seeks 
with might and with unparalleled grandeur the 



A MODERN VIEW 69 

conformity of human will to the divine. The 
possibility and delight of such conformity is the 
inspiration of the prophet and the experience 
of the psalmist. Morality is not a social order, 
it is the invitation of a wise and merciful God 
to a feast. 

And yet the careful reading of the Old Testa- 
ment makes it evident also that in turning from 
it to the New Testament we are turning to a new 
religion. It not only helps us to an apprecia- 
tion of Jesus by revealing to us the moral 
foundations on which he built, but it allows us 
to apprehend that individual contribution of his 
to the Jewish religion that made it the religion 
of mankind. 

It should be said immediately that it is hard 
to prove that Jesus introduced any absolutely 
new religious conception. He himself felt 
that he was not revolutionizing, but completing. 
He was conscious of breaking at serious points 
with the religion of his times, but he was also 
insistent that the religion of his times was a 
degenerate form of the religion of the Old Testa- 
ment. To the teachers of his day he said, 



70 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

"Ye have made the word of God of none effect 
through your tradition." The Old Testa- 
ment was his refuge in temptation and the 
keeping of its commandments was the method 
he recommended to obtain eternal life. In it 
we find the central truths of his gospel either 
clearly uttered by some rare man, or at least 
suggested. If we think of Jesus as demanding 
mercy rather than sacrifice, we find that he was 
anticipated by Amos and by Micah; if we 
think of him as emphasizing the love of God 
rather than the struggles of man after righteous- 
ness, we find Hosea doing the same; if we 
think of him as rejoicing in present personal 
trust on God rather than in expectation of na- 
tional purification and supremacy, we can say 
no less of the author of the twenty-third Psalm ; 
if we realize that he lived in an inner and 
eternal world, we see in the seventy-third 
Psalm the ecstasy of one of the earliest venture- 
some believers in immortality, and we find the 
belief in immortality widespread among the Jews 
when Jesus came; if we think of his wonder- 
ful declaration of the fatherly attitude of God, 



A MODERN VIEW 71 

we find a dim suggestion of it in Isaiah, as 
applied to a group of Israelites, though for a 
clear belief in it as applied to individuals we 
must look to the Apocrypha ; * if, finally, we 
remember his summary of the moral law and 
his refusal to separate the love of God from the 
love of man, we discover an unusually close 
parallel in Jeremiah's summary of Josiah's life, 
which he addressed to Josiah's scoffing son: 
"Did not thy father eat and drink and do jus- 
tice? then it was well with him. He judged 
the cause of the poor and the needy ; then it was 
well. Was not this to know me, saith the 
Lord?" It is no wonder that he said : "I am 
come not to destroy but to fulfil." 

And yet on the other hand we have but to 
read the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to 
Matthew to find that Jesus did not regard the 
Old Testament as the infallible and final word 
of God to men. He did not bow to it as his 
authority ; he deliberately corrected it and sub- 
stituted words of his own for sacred commands 
of the law. With all its insight and sanctity, 
1 Wisdom of Solomon 2 12-24. 



72 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

he knew something holier, the judgment of 
his own soul. He was not dependent upon the 
Old Testament ; he did not hesitate to say that 
while the prophets were the servants of God, 
he was his son. 1 He rejoiced in the suggestions 
that the Old Testament offered of the truth of 
his own heart, but he found them in his heart 
more clear and more spontaneous and more 
compelling than in the book. 

It is a truism to assert that every man has 
one original contribution that he makes to reli- 
gion, namely, his own personality. And yet 
the original element in Christianity is the per- 
sonality of Christ. His personality is recog- 
nized as absolutely supreme in the annals of 
history and stands before men with the value 
of God. From it there is no appeal; to his 
teaching there is no need to add ; no one dreams 
of "fulfilling" his religion. He seems to have 
attracted to himself all the noblest traits of the 
deepest seers of the Old Testament and to have 
rejected all their imperfections. And yet there 
is no suggestion of borrowing. The whole na- 

1 Mark 12 1-12. 



A MODERN VIEW 73 

tion seems to have groaned and travailed to- 
gether to produce him. He seems to be the 
incarnation of the Spirit that had feebly and 
transiently touched one and another of the 
loftiest souls of Israel. In his person all the 
loftiest impulses of the prophets and psalmists 
are blended in such a perfect harmony that it 
is hard to believe we have ever been moved 
by them, even singly, before. It does not seem 
to express the truth to say that he made these 
different impulses his own; they seem to have 
been his own from the beginning; he has no 
acquisitions ; truth was native to him, because 
he was pure in heart. Although coming at the 
end of Jewish history, he seems the fountain 
from which the prophets have drawn. We re- 
member the profound word attributed to him 
in the fourth gospel: " Before Abraham was, 
I am." The word is true, if divested of crass 
realism ; there is no other word that seems so 
adequate. 

It is futile to analyze his person; it is mis- 
leading to put him into opposition with the book 
that he completed or with the impulses of the 



74 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

individuals which he fulfilled or with the 
teachings of the prophets, which all find their 
significance as they take their place in his full- 
orbed utterances. He includes; that is his 
method of correction ; he does not oppose. It 
is a new emphasis that we detect in his gospel 
rather than a new truth, a new emphasis that 
finds its explanation and its significance in 
his character. And yet with him we enter a 
different world. Such is the power of his 
person. 

With this explanation, with the conscious- 
ness that the great secret of Jesus' relation 
to God and to men can never be explained, 
it is, perhaps, not out of place to say 
that Jesus laid a new emphasis on the 
individual as distinguished from the nation, 
on the inner as distinguished from the outer, 
on the present as distinguished from the 
future. 

The Old Testament is a book of such unique 
power that we sometimes wonder why it did 
not redeem the world. After becoming ac- 



A MODERN VIEW 75 

quainted with Jesus, we see that what it lacked 
was the supreme character that was his alone. 
And in his light we see that it never quite shook 
off the chrysalis out of which it came. The 
Jews were a nation, constantly expecting do- 
minion and estimating dominion by outward 
prosperity and power. What they expected 
God to give was national righteousness and 
national dominion and national prosperity, 
and the greatest of the prophets either expected 
these things also or announced their impossi- 
bility as utmost ruin. While in harmony with 
all their best, Jesus seems to move in a different 
world from this. It is an inner world; some 
of the Old Testament writers caught sight of 
such a world ; the authors of the twenty-third 
and the seventy-third Psalms lived in it for mo- 
ments ; Jesus first showed us what it means to 
find in converse with God and in the doing of his 
will the whole of life. He, like Amos and Jere- 
miah, seems to have believed that Jerusalem was 
speedily to be destroyed, but it was not the bur- 
den of his message as of theirs ; it was indeed 
of so little importance that he referred to it but 



76 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

rarely, of so little importance that some find it 
hard to believe that he referred to it at all. 
What was national life compared with the 
trust of the individual on God and God direct- 
ing and loving and controlling the individual ? 
The outer world, outer rewards, outer com- 
forts, outer aims, how little they all mattered 
to one who saw God ! And the future — Jesus 
derived constant encouragement from its splen- 
dor, but when God was to be trusted and served 
in the present, what need of planning for the 
future that was secure with God. "Sufficient 
unto the day is the evil thereof." 

The change of emphasis all depends on an 
inner experience, unexplainable, unparalleled. 
Jesus and God lived together as Son and Father. 
God could love no nation as he loved him, as he 
loved this brother of his and that brother of his. 
As Luther has it, "The worship of God is the 
service of God, and the service of God is the 
service of men." I am sure Luther has the 
emphasis of Christ. It is the service of men, 
not of man ; of the sons and daughters of God, 
not of the human race. Righteousness is lofty 



A MODERN VIEW 77 

and somewhat vague, and no individual can 
claim it. Jesus demands something higher, 
which seems to be service of those we love — 
for no man is to go unloved by us. Jesus saved 
the race by forgetting it in the saving of men. 
Jesus did not announce principles; he spoke 
home to the heart of men. A prominent Jap- 
anese writer appears to understand the genius 
of Christianity when he says: " It is as a state 
and not as a society that we [Japanese] have 
made progress, and now the time has come to 
make changes in society. This is dependent 
on the personal character of those in authority 
and personal character is best improved or 
changed by Christianity." 1 

The Old Testament impresses us as a book 
of longing, the New as a book of joy; the 
Old Testament as a book of national right- 
eousness and national faith, the New as a 
book of individual men, set face to face 
with God by an individual man; the Old 
Testament as a book of a great ambition, 

1 Dr. Nitobe, in " Bushido," quoted by Rev. Morton 
Dunning in " The Need of the World," Boston, 1906. 

tore, 



78 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

the New as a book of a great sacrifice. But in 
the last analysis, the difference lies in the char- 
acter of Christ. It is this character which the 
failure of the Old Testament to redeem the 
world emphasizes, a character, however, deeply- 
reverent toward the book which it alone made 
"Old," 



VI 

CONCLUSION 

I cherish the hope that enough has been 
adduced to prove that modern scholarship, far 
from being a foe to religion, is its servant. 
These religious goods that I have mentioned 
are very simple — otherwise they would not be 
of high religious value. But they have been 
clearly offered only by modern scholarship. 
It alone has sketched the times of these widely 
separated individuals with sufficient clearness of 
outline to enable us to sympathize with the in- 
dividuals themselves; only recently have they 
become real men with power to grip our souls. 
Modern scholarship alone has demonstrated 
that the great truths of religion have been actu- 
ally discovered in the course of history. It 
has enabled us to stand reverently at the birth 
hours of those sublime conceptions on which the 
world of moral thought and religious splendor 

79 



80 RELIGIOUS VALUE OF OLD TESTAMENT 

is founded. It alone has aroused that historical 
understanding of the times of Jesus which has 
allowed us to perceive the Hebrew spirit in 
the Son of God. It alone has shattered the 
shocking limitations of the older view to which 
I have alluded. It has shown us that the 
Old Testament is God's great means for mak- 
ing us acquainted with him rather than a sure 
proof that he is, but that we can never know 
him well. 

The religious value of the Old Testament 
consists in too many things for us even to 
mention them, but it at least may be said to 
consist partially in these that I have named. 
The Old Testament presents to our souls 
characters that are supremely worthy of our 
reverence because consciously centred in God 
and full of his power. It permits us to share 
the enthusiasm of the men who discovered 
the fundamentals of our religion and the 
character of our God. It is indispensable 
to complete discipleship of Christ, because it 
is the creator of the mould which his soul 
expanded. 



CONCLUSION 81 

Higher values than these, religiously, there 
are not. No man save Jesus ever had the 
right to lay the book that offered these aside. 
And he made it immortal. 



MAR 8 1907 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: June 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



tf 



iHlWHu HIMUMHU 'Mm'^'M UMH 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




014 327 715 A ♦ 



i 






iiiiiiiii 









IMH! 



